XHTML was originally released as a standard in 2000 and within five years, it was widely being implemented by major websites. Even the strict standard complying websites such as Microsoft started using XHTML as for primary web pages msn.com and microsoft.com. However, despite the popular use among major websites, it is still used at a small scale. This is mainly because when W3C released the brand new standard, all other websites did not stop using HTML as the standard as it functioned just fine. Even in the near future, there is no likelihood of HTML ceasing to be the majority standard used by websites.
Instead of conforming to the newly introduced XHTML standard, web designers continued to stick to familiar methods that they were comfortable with. As both standards perform well in each and every web browser, it precluded the urgent need for switching to a new standard. Nonetheless, the XHTML standard offers advantages that HTML falls short on. XHTML brings a complete uniformity to the structure of a document by separating the web page content and design. Moreover, a web developer can easily separate the design and content by using the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) that give more control over page display.
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